The Double-Slit Experiment
by Cortana49
Summary: Tired of Amy's overt attempts at seducing him, Sheldon pursues a Relationship Agreement loophole that says Amy can have relations with Penny. Now, Sheldon is forced to take up the burden of curing Penny of her inconvenient heterosexual behavior. He co-opts a real experiment, so if the title offends, it's your own dirty mind's fault. Amy/Penny femslash, dubcon due to skeevy behavior
1. The Dancing Heart Intrusion

Sheldon couldn't sleep. No matter how hard he tried to relax, no matter how many times he counted Doctors, companions, and associated characters (no way was Mickey a companion!), sleep could not overtake his active brain. His brilliant mind refused to be quieted until he addressed the problem at hand and found a solution to his troubles. Sometimes, it was quite burdensome to be as smart as him.

Sighing, he slipped out of bed, padded into the kitchen and fixed himself a nice cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot). Taking a sip, he shook his head. What was he going to do with Amy?

While he liked the general premise of keeping a girlfriend-keeping a woman at his side to constantly worship his genius and do his bidding like one of those blobby yellow minions from _Despicable Me_-the implied amorous activity between boyfriend and girlfriend in the romantic relationship social contract defined by mainstream American culture made keeping Amy into a Dyson-sphere-sized headache for him. The silly girl was overcome with sexuality-inducing estrogen, and her weak-willed female brain had forsaken the cool-headed rational realm of intellect for the flippity-floppity backwards land of physical attraction. Nothing Sheldon did seemed to curb her behavior. Simply ordering her not to try to seduce him was ineffective. Though technically in violation of the Relationship Agreement, he wasn't about to end it, lest Amy wind up holding hands with some nerf herder like Stewart, and she knew that. Assigning special responsibilities as punishment, like polishing his _Star Trek_ starship models, made her grimace but were ultimately ineffective at stopping fancy-pants sexual innuendos and nude visits. Even spanking her hiny until his hand hurt for days afterward seemed to have no effect whatsoever, and she requested that punishment so often that Sheldon was almost starting to think that she derived some kind of bizarre enjoyment out of the experience!

He wondered if there were something in the Relationship Agreement he overlooked. Taking his tea over to his desk, he removed the thirty-one page contract and began to carefully read. His cup was almost empty by the time he saw it: a tiny amendment to the exclusivity clause. _If it is acknowledged that THE GIRLFRIEND remain bound to THE BOYFRIEND in all aspects of the relationship, THE GIRLFRIEND may be allowed romantic liaisons with the alternate party Penny (here and after known as PENNY) without violating exclusivity._

It was a bazinga. At least, Sheldon had always thought of it as one.

The amendment came about after a silly discussion the two of them had about Sexual Orientation Change Efforts. Sheldon was working from the obvious premise that SOCE were all completely ineffective, as was the scientific consensus. The American Psychological Association published a 2009 report denouncing them as conservative religious hokum. Amy, however, adopted a hippie-dippie hokum stance that SOCE were only flawed in that they came from the religious and conservative standpoint that homosexuality was a sinful or diseased behavior to be treated, asserting that general sexual attraction and behavior could be changed through recognition of the "fluidity" of sexual orientation, citing reports of bisexual behavior published by the Kinsey Institute. Amy then proposed a psychological study in which she would apply social pressures to induce homosexual behavior in an ostensibly exclusively heterosexual woman, Penny. Sheldon had laughed soundly at the girl's feeble attempts at social "science." Amy might well be a bisexual woman herself, but Sheldon had seen far too many under-dressed men looking like the sort who used to beat him up in school to think that Penny would ever alter her sexual behavior so dramatically as to willingly engage in coitus with women on a regular basis, and he knew she would never even do what Amy really wanted: engage in coitus with his girlfriend. Amy was just a silly girl with a silly crush on a woman who would never see her as more than a platonic social partner. It amused him, so he accepted her proposal, made an amendment to the Relationship Agreement, and watched her repeatedly try and fail to secure Penny as a mate.

Eventually, Amy reached the same conclusion as Sheldon. She dismissed the hippie-dippie SOCE hypothesis as hokum, abandoned her attempts to seduce Penny, and focused her attention on Sheldon. Now, _Sheldon_ was the one who had to deal with Amy's crude attempts at behavior-modification, pressures to engage in coitus, and idiotic spam posing as friendly email contributions. He did not need dancing heart animated gifs and random pictures of cats, no sir!

He thoughtfully stroked his chin where he imagined an impressive Riker-like beard would sit whenever he retired and decided to let himself go. Maybe this amendment was the key to his Amy problems! If Amy could direct all her sexual urges toward Penny while remaining as his girlfriend, he'd get to keep his minion without having to deal with the constant headaches!

Sure, _Amy_ couldn't solve the problem of Penny's heterosexual attraction and behavior, but her brain-while impressive compared to a Muggle's-was nothing compared to his superior noggin. He just had to take her work and improve upon it to perfection. (This might require acknowledging Amy's hypothesis as conceptually sound, but he wasn't going to focus on such trivialities.)

It only took him thirty minutes to hack into Amy's personal computer. From there, it was simple to read up on all her efforts to reform SOCE using Penny as the main subject, despite Amy's poor organizational techniques. Didn't that girl know that a disorganized desktop led to a disorganized mind? He generously took an hour to whip her file structure into shape, leaving helpful organizational tips in a prominently displayed .txt file on her desktop. What would she do without him?

Remembering Penny, he returned to examining Amy's work. It was interesting; Amy managed a modicum of success when Penny was in a state of intoxication. Amy's conclusions about Penny having some homosexual interests repressed by years of growing up in a conservative environment that treated homosexuality as taboo did seem remarkably plausible. It was Amy's attempts to bring out this homosexual inclination in the state of sobriety that suffered horribly. Amy concluded that it was impossible for her to bring out whatever homosexuality lurked beneath the surface.

Sheldon shook his head. Amy, Amy, Amy... She committed the same conceptual error as the religiously-motivated SOCE. She thought of human sexuality as existing within far too small a model. Without the proper framework, it was impossible to adequately address the problem at hand. The incidence of Penny expressing appreciation for Amy's attempts at seduction while in a state of intoxication was not merely pulling away societally-induced sexual repression to reveal something underneath; it was actually one _vertex_ of a larger shape. What Amy-and, now, Sheldon-needed to do was discover a second vertex of her homosexual attraction, from which a line could be formed. More to the point, it would allow her homosexuality to be expressed more fully.

It was like in 1803, when the English scientist Thomas Young set out to prove light displayed the properties of a wave. He shone a beam of light upon a screen, on which he cut two slits some distance apart. If light displayed only the properties of a particle-as was wildly believed due to the experiments of Isaac Newton-then it could be expected that the light traveling through the slits would cast only two narrow shafts of light on the surface behind the screen. Young, however, showed that the light behaved in the manner of a wave. The separate parts of light traveling through the slits interacted with each other with the same interference expected by water or sound, and they produced a broad shine cast upon the whole of the surface behind the screen.

Amy cut a single slit in Penny's repression, and she received the small modicum of homosexuality that shone through. What she needed to have done was cut another slit to allow her homosexuality to truly emerge. Sheldon was certain he could succeed where his girlfriend failed and cut the secondary slit. Then Amy would divert her sexual expression away from him!

And so, Sheldon set out to perform his own version of the double-slit experiment. Weeks later, Amy would ask him if the double entendre were intentional. Sheldon would blink and wonder, "What double entendre?"


	2. The X Infrequency

The following night, Phase 1 of Sheldon's double-slit experiment was underway. He needed to induce a general state of sexual arousal in the subject, one not exclusively associated with heterosexual attraction. Knowing Penny's libido, this would not be a difficult task.

Hacking into Penny's computer was a piece of cake. The silly girl simply used Leonard69 for a password. A half-lobotomized monkey could figure that one out.

Her file organization was about thirty times worse than Amy's. It took all of Sheldon's effort not to clean it up. Like Jack Bauer planting spyware in a terrorist's laptop, he needed to keep everything apparently the same to keep Penny from being alerted to Sheldon's tampering.

As soon as he had control over himself, he installed onto her machine a substitution cypher program that he'd spent the night making, one that would alter all text she viewed to display subliminal stimuli. The popular understanding of subliminal messages was loaded with hokum, but there was some real science behind the practice. It wouldn't completely take over a viewer's mind or even have a quarter of the suggestibility of consciously reading a message, but many academic studies showed it did have some measurable effect. In this case, Penny consciously reading an overt SOCE stimulation was the last thing Sheldon wanted, so the minor power subliminal suggestion had would have to do.

The way the program worked was taking the message he inputed and distributing it across paragraphs of text through altering the font of each character that appeared in his message to be slightly different from the font of the native text. If Penny viewed an article rendered in Arial, the program would alter relevant characters to appear in Helvetica. The change was so slight that only the most intelligent, aware minds could notice it consciously. Penny's intelligence and awareness was little better than that of a Cocker Spaniel, and Sheldon knew that only her subconscious mind would be able to see and interpret it. Penny would then be able to absorb and internalize the message without even knowing what was happening.

What to write was the question. Sheldon at first went for the obvious: a simple repetition of the term _coitus_. That was how reasonable people labeled the act of sexual intercourse, but he soon realized that Penny was far from reasonable. She could barely even maintain her laptop without running to him and Leonard like they were her own personal Nerd Herd. He needed to dumb it down considerably to make her subconscious mind capable of comprehending.

His next thought was to use the word _sex_, but that too was doomed for failure. With a relative frequency of only 0.150%, the letter X was the third least letter used in the English language after Z and Q. What he needed was a simply worded message using frequent letters.

After some thought, he came up with the somewhat longer than intended but straightforward _Men are bad. Women are hot._ It would serve to establish a subtle push away from men and to women as viable sexual partners. Given the strength of Penny's heterosexual attraction, he doubted that his message would truly induce a total disregard for the male of the species, but it would prime her for the subsequent message that women were "hot" and therefore could replace men as sexual targets.

The program ran its course. He pulled up Penny's web browser to test it. There was a fashion article loaded. It now displayed the altered text, obvious to him but hidden for those who occupied a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder.

_Her **men**swe**ar**-inspir**e**d tuxedo jacket and slouchy **b**oyfriend je**a**ns were a cool counterpoint to the gar**d**en party–ready **w**edge sandals. The 24-year-**o**ld actress has always had a soft spot for bucket bags, and the Kenneth Cole one she sported today co**m**plem**en**ted the s**a**ndy hue on the st**r**aps of h**e**r s**ho**es. Ka**t**e **M**iddl**e**to**n** h**a**s long been a champion of the wedge as an all-te**r**rain summ**e**r shoe..._

It was an excellent start. However, it wasn't complete. There was still the matter of inducing Penny's sexual arousal in the first place.

Sheldon puzzled on that for a while. He couldn't very well perform the subliminal stimuli marketers did. His purpose was entirely different. He wasn't trying to induce desire to buy products by associating them with sex. He was trying to sell sex itself. The obvious approach would be to Photoshop her images to include sexual imagery in the manner of marketers, but he didn't know the first thing about doing that, and one misstep would doom him to Amy's perpetual advances.

If he could, he would just install a program to flash the word _sex_ at her, but something that obvious wouldn't work at all. Or would it?

"Eureka," he whispered to himself.

Spam. The answer was spam. Spammers were constantly trying to download adware and malware onto people's drives. If he made his inducement look like spam, he could make it overt without Penny ever catching on.

He hacked into Wolowitz' computer. The man was a complete pervert, so of course pornography took up most of his disk space. Sheldon had a hunch that this pornography included... Yes. Folders of pornographic media featuring actors that resembled people he knew in real life, including Penny and Amy... and Koothrappali. What?

Sheldon couldn't help himself. He opened the Koothrappali folder. It contained over a hundred videos and images of South Asian women who did bear a distinct resemblance to Raj if he had been born female and was insecure about their natural breast size. Huh.

He returned to the task at hand. Entering the Penny and Amy folders, he copied a few of the items featuring women who closely resembled them to his drive and left Wolowitz' computer be, with a mental note to come back and organize it later. He ran a virus scan on the items to make sure what he was planning to do to Penny didn't happen to him, and then he got to work examining the contents with a hand held over the screen to block the indecent parts.

Finding a suitable video, he got to work on his fake spam. It took two hours, but he managed to create the perfect piece of subliminal messaging to hide in plain sight. He installed it on Penny's computer along with a virus that would make it almost impossible to get rid of without Sheldon's kill switch. Whenever she booted up her machine, a seven-second video would play featuring an actress who looked like Penny mastur... ahem, uh, mastur... touching her bathing suit area, along with a caption reading _You want sexy girls?_ It would resemble in all respects an ad for pornography. Clicking it would even send the user to a pornography site. However, Penny's subconscious mind would identify with the actress and induce sexual arousal while at the same time internalizing the message that maybe she does want sexy girls.

It wouldn't work right away. Sheldon knew that. However, it would set the stage for Phase 2.


End file.
